i am back from 3 day ban (well mute), so i havent been able to give feedback about the merge and after this post i wouldnt be surprised if am given new mute cause of shitty moderation.
if you are active member of community, then you would know that i was one of the biggest proponents for merge and i still believe if done properly it would have been excellent for the game. but what happened over the weekend has left me flabbergasted by sheer incompetence shown by DF and gaijin. they failed on so many points that i cant defend the way they implemented the merge.
so lets start by points.
1. Communication
communication has been shit from day 1 since they announced the merge. they literally dropped the news about merge without any specific information. there were numerous questions asked and only few were vaguely answered in follow up Q&A devblogs. lot of information that was communicated at start is simply not relevant to the implemented merge.
to this list we can add first testing with completely different MM from what was announced in middle of hard grind event. then add to this launching every subsequent testing without any prior announcement and lasting one day and implementing live launch with no prior announcement (no i dont count 12 hour announcement about maintenance to be one)
we had almost year of no information about almost anything specific inside the merge, just to be overwhelmed with 4 fast test servers inside a month and live (bad) implementation soon after. ffs everyone was focused on worst problems inside the test servers cause of limited testing time that nobody had time to even evaluate every new implemented stuff. not to mention ignoring negative feedback on those test servers by majority of players and continuing implementing that in production.
also show of failure to communicate is no guides and tutorials for new UI to rest of the playerbase.
no this is not acceptable communication towards players and customers.
2. Planning
i am almost 100% certain that at the start of the year there was absolute no plan and analysis on how to approach this merge. they had so much data available about players with which they could have run simulations and analysis on every possible MM algorithm, but they either didnt do it or if they did they didnt inform the players.
few simulations could have given you options which you could have presented to the players on best way forward with minimum backlash. there was extensive feedback about numerous topics about merge, but simply it was not taken.
to me it seems like most of the year DF/gaijin didnt do jack shit and then in last quarter they hurried implementation of bad plan cause of EOY goals.
3. Tech tree
simply it is failure. i think that most people didnt even notice grind in tech tree cause they were so focused on conversion and MM. people were complaining about 10 tier tech tree cause they were afraid of grind implications, just for it to be compressed to 5 tiers after feedback, but it contained same number of weapons as 10 tier tech counterpart. tiers werent the problem, but xp required per weapon/vehicle and total grind amount. and that is information that we didnt know before first test server that was held in middle of heavy grind event (so i didnt even check it out, as well as many other people).
people were celebrating that they dont need to do multiple grind of same weapon, but they didnt notice that in most cases grind to the same weapon postmerge is 2-20 times more expensive then in previous campaigns, negating one of the biggest advantage of merge and that is reduction of grind.
if you include everything in all campaigns alongside multiple same grind, you will get to absolute number that is much bigger than post merge, but you must take into account that you could get all end game gear for half the xp (alongside low/mid tier gear).
4. Economy
i will not go deep into economy cause i have not analyzed it, nor do i have premerge data. i will just make observation that everyone will have significantly less income (xp and silver/orders) cause of more human players per side.
problems that i found in economy is mostly on soldier side. getting squad of max stat soldiers is impossible in new economy. every soldier is 10 times more expensive making RNG lottery for max stat soldier impossible even for richest of players. this is simply one of the things that needs to be fixed either by having a way to increase stat to max or by significantly reducing cost of the soldier.
5. Matchmaking
whether you were for BR/balance or for HA, everyone agrees that new MM is atrocious. ffs every player that was on those 4 test servers was unified in opinion that 2 queue MM is terrible. promise of increasing number of queues if player number increases is utterly stupid. even at the cost of increasing number of bots there needed to be at least 3 queues.
6. Squads, uniforms and customization
this is shitshow that was completely avoidable. there is problem with customization, there is problem with uniforms, there is problem with people having hundreds of squads, there is problem with equipping them, there is problem with removing equipment from them, there is problem with BR, there is problem with veterans fielding 2 KT vs newbies that will be only able to field 1 KT etc.
they could have easily implemented idea of generic squads (e.g assaulters 1, assaulters 2 etc.) that were connected to their counterparts in campaigns. how would that work? if you ended up on normandy you would have uniforms from assaulter 1 squad in normandy or if you ended up in tunisia you would have uniforms from assaulters 1 squad in tunisia. they could have default unequipped all squads and saved their campaign equipment as presets.
simply no problem with hundreds of squads, no problem with loads of weapons that you dont know where they ended up, no problem with customization (unless someone requested refund), no problem from ahistorical squads in different battlefields, no problem with loadouts. IIRC i made similar suggestion as feedback in one of the news topics.
7. New perk/soldier system
in middle of merge you introduced game changing mechanism with absolutely no information. i understand that there is no better time to introduce this with change in game mechanism, but problem is that players had almost no time to take closer look cause they were overwhelmed with numerous changes in the game on test server alongside hard grind events.
8. Testing
does DF know what is the goal of testing? it is to collect bug reports and feedback. if feedback is negative or there are numerous bug reports you either go back to planning board or you postpone the live implementation. if feedback is positive and there are negligible bugs you go around with implementation.
is corporate forcing this update for EOY goals or are devs incompetent? or is it combination of both? ffs you DONT LAUNCH OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK VERSION OF TEST BUILD INTO LIVE PRODUCTION. if this happened in any dev job that i had i would be fired alongside my company having to pay massive penalty.
TL;DR
this has been show of utter incompetence from the side of DF/gaijin. from lack of information provided during most of the year, to going contrary to previously provided information, to making short stealth tests, to ignoring community feedback then to abruptly launching unfinished implementation that has overwhelmingly negative feedback.
